Carl Von Ossietzky

Born Oct. 3, 1889, in Hamburg; died May 4, 1938, in Berlin. German journalist of Polish descent.

Ossietzky served in World War I. He organized a pacifist movement in Hamburg and was the founder of the weekly newspaper Die Revolution. In 1919 he became the secretary of the German Peace Society in Berlin. He was the political reviewer and, from 1927, the editor in chief of the journal Weltbühne. Ossietzky’s highly polemical articles were written in the best traditions of German political prose as exemplified by H. Heine and F. Mehring.

For his exposure of German militarism and his sympathy for the USSR, Ossietzky was accused of treason and imprisoned in the Sonnenburg concentration camp in 1933. T. Mann, R. Rolland, and H. Barbusse took part in a campaign to free him. When, in 1936, Ossietzky received the Nobel Prize for peace, the fascists were compelled to transfer the seriously ill writer to a hospital, where he died in 1938.